January 25, 2005

• nice....
• hmm... I'd prefer to see this story verified somehow. I think only cartoon elephants can perform the actions described.
• Similar stories were on other sites in the last few weeks (inc BBC), so I'm prepared to think that our giant, grey, big-nosed overlords have arrived. I for one welcome them, and would like to offer them a peanut like in the cartoons.
• do elephants suck peanuts up their noses? i always thought so. but that probably would choke them. they drink through their noses, right?
• Slate recently carried an Explainer about similar events in Sri Lanka. Essentially, the explanation was: "We don't know how or why, but some animals knew that danger was coming." The elephants in the Reuters story only picked up the humans after being directed to by their keepers, rather than doing it of their own accord. That's more plausible than the animals just picking people up and running for the hills.
• the huge beasts used their trunks to pluck the foreigners from the ground and deposit them on their backs. That sounds painful.
• plucked like pink carrots...
• elephants can talk via extremely low frequencies. they have really big ears. they can sniff the air in a desert and be lead to water. these super senses are probably responsible for sensing the initial quake and the onrushing wave by hearing and feeling. and they drink like a misbehaving kid with a straw.
• Elephants have very flexible, er, snout-ends, kind of like little lips. The pick up the peanuts with the end of their trunk and place them in their mouths.
• Oh sure garfield, and I bet they fight crime and they are allergic to kryptonite and they wear their underpants on the outside. Sheesh you kids today and your goddam mobile phones or whatever.
• they drink water by sucking it into their straw then blowing it into their mouth as well.
• by straw i meant trunk
• Am I the only one who was hoping they'd finally gotten rid of orange and replaced it with a good flavor?
• As for the elephants sensing the quake and tsunami, they hear and use subsonic frequencies so they would have "heard" the earthquake and then "heard" the approaching tsunami. http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=842&category=Science The intelligence and highly sensitive nature of elephants has intrigued Dr. Lynette Hart, who is Professor of Animal Behavior and Human Animal Interaction in the Department of Population Health and Reproduction at the UC-Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. She has studied the way elephants vocalize through the air. Not only can elephants trumpet loudly and run quickly, Dr. Hart thinks the animals perceive sound frequencies from seismic events that humans cannot hear ­ frequencies that are subsonic.
• Why only foreigners? Damned racist elephants...
• There's nothing on snopes about this. I'd like to see their take on it.
• I think we are agreed - elephants ROCK!
• Hero elephants also mentioned in this thread about elephants.
• Pavarotti loves elephants too.
• I've got a weasel on my shoulder, it's truth, it's actual, every day I'm growing older... ...but no wiser, alas.
• Elephants are born old. To have wrinkles from the start signifies their wisdom the way it does with sponges.... The trunk is an extension of their wrinkles, the high point of their ancientness, and so much ancientness moves in a herd for self-protection. So many wrinkles join forces to achieve the tranquility of elephants, their uncanny measure of canniness. Just arrive at all earth's wrinkles, to reach the furrows' depths where there is no sun, where neither climate nor desires are, to claim the wisdom of the sponge and take i everything. to everything be open, and grow old from such openness is to fade away from lack of character and on the inside always be a herd, never a single self. -- Fabio Morabito, "Elephants are born old"
• Shoulf read From "Elephants are born old"
• mmmm, Bees, delicious!